Jay Leno on Opportunity
By“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak.”
Jay Leno knows marketing?
My take: Given the recent delirium over swine flu (or as I heard it referred to earlier this week, “hamthrax”), I simply couldn’t resist this quote. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that swine flu is a concoction of some industry who stands to benefit from curing it (Purell, anyone?). Of course, with all due respect to the swine flu, the real point here has to do with reacting. Crises breed opportunity. Problems always need a solution. If what you offer can somehow help solve the problem du jour, and you have the skill and drive to react in time, then the steak is yours.
Can you think of any successful products that were bred in response to crisis?
This post is part of the weekly series Marketing Quotes by Marketing Greats, posted every Thursday at MarketingInProgress.com (beginning January 1, 2009). Read every marketing quote by a marketing great entry here.
3 Comments
May 7th, 2009 at 10:20 am
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May 8th, 2009 at 8:33 am
In regards to your post, I always liked this quote:
“If your not part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem” – Despair.com
I think that is more what some companies see crises as – do they really want to solve it, because if they did then they would be out money. A little pessimistic of me I know.
May 8th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
I find it amazing that Eisenhower warned of the issues with the U.S. entering the military industrial complex where certain businesses could only succeed when there was war. Since then, it’s been a pretty interesting prophecy.
Travis, I love Despair.com’s quote. Gotta keep that one at hand at all times.